Not long ago I was asked point-blank if a short story I’d written, wherein the narrator gets high on crack cocaine, was based on firsthand knowledge. This was not the first time someone had inquired if I’d had similar experiences as my fictional characters: soldier at war, manager of a Walmart, cook in a restaurant, et cetera. It’s a slightly invasive line of questioning, to be sure, but mostly it’s flattering, because, after all, the question implies that I’ve managed to create a world so convincing that the reader has been forced to wonder whether what they’re reading has actually crossed the threshold into the realm of nonfiction. I will sometimes answer honestly—no, I was never a soldier; no, I was never a manager; yes, I was a cook—but often I’ll deflect, especially when it’s one of my creative writing students asking about my possible drug use in front of the entire class. All that matters, I will say didactically and evasively, is whether the story seems real.

Which is why I will sometimes give these same creative writing students, who are curious to know about me, an assignment to write a piece of fiction about themselves, in which they are the central character—but several decades older. What story can they create about who they might be in the future based upon the raw material of who they are now? This is, at least to my way of thinking, a quick and painless way for a beginning writer to launch into the world of fiction, by being obliged to build from facts close at hand. Some students, naturally, will ignore my guidelines and take the easy way out, recycling a short story they wrote for a previous fiction class, putting their first name on the middle-age character, who happens to have gray hair and shares no characteristics, as far I can tell, with the twenty-year-old author. Perhaps these students believe that when they are older they will be completely different from who they are at present—and how can I argue with that?

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Jack Kerouac and Lucien Carr.

The first time Jack Kerouac’s name appeared in the press was August 17, 1944, when he and William Burroughs were arrested as material witnesses to murder. While the headlines were consumed that day with news of the Allies’ successful landing on the southern coast of France, the murder was sensational enough to make the front page of the New York Times: “Columbia Student Kills Friend and Sinks Body in Hudson River.”

With noirish drama, the newspaper called the murder “a fantastic story of homicide”: a nineteen-year-old undergraduate had stabbed his older companion several times with his Boy Scout knife in the early morning hours in Riverside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Working with frantic haste in the darkness, unaware of whether anyone had seen him,” the article related, “the college student gathered together as many small rocks and stones as he could quickly find and shoved them into [the victim’s] pockets and inside his clothing. Then he pushed the body into the swift-flowing water.”

The student was the St. Louis native Lucien Carr, who possessed a mixture of delinquency, good looks, and intellectual charm. His victim was the thirty-one-year-old David Kammerer, a tall lanky man with dark-red hair and a high-pitched voice who was a friend of William Burroughs. The two lived near each other in Greenwich Village, where Kammerer worked as a building janitor. Months prior to the murder, through his friendship with Kammerer and Burroughs, Carr had met Kerouac and fellow Columbia student Allen Ginsberg. Read More

Sleeping Girl, by Yiannoulis Halepas, 1878 [Photo: Nikos Vatopoulos]

So try and concentrate. An epigram is, strictly speaking, a little poem that makes a point. It doesn’t necessarily dramatize; it doesn’t necessarily have an image. But it has to say something. This is an epigram:

THEIR SEX LIFE

One failure on
Top of another

Haikus are not epigrams. “Pigeons on the grass, alas” is not an epigram. It might be clearer to say an epigram doesn’t just make a point. An epigram scores a point.

An epigraph is one of those little quotations you see at the beginning of a novel or, say, a T. S. Eliot poem. The epigraph to Anna Karenina is from the Bible: “Vengeance is mine; I shall repay.” The epigraph to Jude the Obscure is “The letter killeth.”

Naturally, epigrams can be used as epigraphs, but let’s not even. This article is about epitaphs. An epitaph is a little dab of poetry that you stick on a gravestone. It doesn’t have to be about the deceased, but it usually is. Keats suggested a good one for himself, and they actually used it: “Here lies one whose name is writ in water.” That’s not really a poem, but it’s a little dab of poetry. It counts.

Epitaphs are a good idea. You got your block of stone, you got the cutter standing there, chisel in hand, waiting for what to put. One of God’s children has fallen; gotta write something. Give a précis of his or her life in four lines. Or say how the person died. Remind people they’re next. Anyhow, you have to say something.

The ancient Greeks loved this. They made zillions of these things. In fact, a very large chunk of the book we call the Greek Anthology is nothing but epitaphs.

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Nabarun Bhattacharya. Photo: Aranya Sen.

I first came across the work of Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014) about a decade ago in Calcutta, after a long afternoon of wandering conversation of the kind that Bengalis call adda, a session that no doubt included numerous cups of tea, many cigarettes, much talk about books, films, and politics before peaking, in the evening, with kebabs and cheap Indian rum. These freewheeling hours of aimless mental flaneurie that make no concessions to modernity’s iron cage of productivity and self-improvement have their own usefulness. Somewhere in the course of that day, from the recommendations of my companions, I ended up buying a copy of Harbart.

The book was printed, in the manner characteristic of Bengali publishing, as an emaciated hardboard volume that resembled a pamphlet more than a hardback. Yet appearances can be deceptive, and in this case, in more ways than one. The slimness of Harbart, like the seeming fragility of its eponymous protagonist, was mere camouflage. It wasn’t a book so much as a bomb, assembled with precision and intent. It was as if Bhattacharya had meticulously gathered fragments from a broken, fractured world, wiring the parts together with language and soldering the terminals with humor, compassion, and rage—and then set the story on a timer. You can hear it ticking as you read Harbart, before the book explodes in your hands.

The target of this novel-bomb is not the reader but the complacency of the reader, and everything that has gone into making that complacency possible—the beguiling but brutal fantasies of capitalism, consumerism, and globalization; the mythologies of power that will not look at those left behind or those being reluctantly dragged along; the smug assertion, ever since the collapse of the internationalist left in the nineties, that we are living, give or take a few incidental details, in the best of all possible times. Read More